Monthly Archives: February 2012

It used to be that I didn’t really care about the Oscars.  I love movies, but the whole awards thing?  Could not have cared less about who went home with the silly statues.  When my dear friend Carrie moved to Boston and invited me to her Oscars party, I went because the party sounded fun.

That was more than 10 years ago, and since then, I’ve gotten just a little more into the whole thing.   There were years I participated in the mad Oscars “Death Race”, trying to see as many of the nominees as possible – leading to some poor decisions, like going, alone, to see The Hours while struggling with my own rocky transition to motherhood (not something I would recommend) to sitting through the entirety of Gangs of New York (also not something I would recommend, although my companions seemed to enjoy it, I think?).  I learned from that year, and now I give myself a pass for the movies I really think I’ll hate (so, no, I didn’t see No Country for Old Men, nor did I see There Will Be Blood).  It’s also led me to seek out movies that I have deeply loved, but might never have made the time to go see without the pull of the Oscars to draw me in.  Last year’s Biutiful stayed with me for days and days, I loved it so much and I would never have seen it if I weren’t trying to see all the Oscar movies.

But my favorite, favorite part of Oscar season is going to see the Shorts programs.  They put together the nominees for Animated, Live Action and Documentaries into three programs, so you can see them all in one place, and I love them.

When we first started going, they played a single night, at one theater in all of Boston, and it felt like an awesome secret – something neat and fun that almost nobody else did or even knew about.  Now, they’re more popular and more widely available (you can even download them from iTunes, if you want to), but it still feels like this oddball thing to go do, and I would be incredibly sad to miss it.

This year’s crop of movies was only disappointing in that there were not any really wacky entries – you know, those movies that just make you stare at the screen, not quite believing what you’re seeing (there’s almost always at least one or two of those), but I really enjoyed them all, especially the animated ones.  A Morning Stroll, with its take on a random city dweller’s encounter with a chicken;  Dimanche, crudely drawn (and the weirdest of the bunch) with a child’s eye view of a small town Sunday;  La Luna,  a lovely fable about how the moon changes its phases and about finding your place in the order of things, Wild Life, a visually gorgeous story of a British emigre to the Canadian frontier and how unsuited he was to the life on the prairie and The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore, which was beautiful and whimsical, depicting how much richer the world of books makes our lives.

As always, the documentaries were sad and traumatic – it’s saying something that the one about the American civil rights movement was the most uplifting one of the bunch – and they didn’t have the one I really wanted to see about the starlet turned nun.

The live action shorts were a good mix of funny, poignant and downright heartbreaking.  I loved was Time Freak, mostly because I think that’s exactly what I’d do if I had a time machine, obsessively try to fix every little stupid thing I did, over and over and over.  Raju just broke my heart in about twelve different ways.

I won’t even begin to make a prediction about which one will win – I’m never right, whether I try to guess based on what I think the Academy wants to reward or based on which one I liked the most.  I can never even manage to pick a favorite, never mind the winner.

If you want to see more, you can see trailers and find showings here.